This application includes a microfiche appendix containing two (2) microfiche and one hundred ten (110) total frames and is incorporated herein in its entirety by reference.
All of the material in this patent application is subject to copyright protection under the copyright laws of the United States of America and of other countries. As of the first effective filing date of this application, this material is protected as unpublished material. However, permission to copy this material is hereby granted to the extent that the copyright owner has no objection to the facsimile reproduction by anyone of the patent documentation or the patent disclosure, including the microfiche appendix, as it appears in the United States Patent and Trademark Office patent file or records but otherwise reserves all copyright rights whatsoever.
1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a computer network and computer software for interactively manipulating a control, particularly a graphical control in a client-server environment.
2. Description of the Related Art
Graphical controls are used in a variety of software programs (xe2x80x9csoftwarexe2x80x9d) allowing a user to interact with the software by using a pointer (i.e., a mouse, touch pad, etc.) and manipulating or selecting a graphical control displayed on the user""s display screen. The graphical control is often linked to data stored on the computer system. When the user manipulates the graphical control, the corresponding data is also updated without the user having to manually enter the data. For example, a Gantt chart uses graphical bars to represent underlying task data such as start date, duration, resources, etc. In a Gantt chart example, the user is presented with an interactive Gantt interface which enables the user to actually edit the underlying task structure by using the mouse pointer to modify the layout of the bars in the Gantt chart (i.e., stretching a bar to represent an increase in duration, moving a bar to change the scheduling order, etc.). This method of data presentation and manipulation has proven to be an intuitive and efficient process for user interaction and modification of the underlying data.
An increasingly popular feature for enterprise based system applications is to provide some subset of the application""s functionality through a browser-based interface that can be used to gain access to data via the Internet; World Wide Web (the Web) portion of the Internet, extranets, or other computer network. In a network setting, the data often resides on a common server so that it can be shared with more than one user. The users"" computer systems (clients) access the data residing on the server from separate computer systems connected to a computer network common to both the server computer system and the client computer systems. The client computer systems display graphical controls to the users representative of the data residing on the server computer system.
A challenge using a browser-based interface is being able to provide web-based data manipulation controls that require minimal resources on the client computer system. Interactive web-based controls that perform complex tasks have been implemented using Java applet or ActiveX technologies. These technologies require the client computer system to download considerable amounts of compiled code and often expose incompatibilities between browsers. Users are often wary of downloading and executing code from unfamiliar sites on the Internet for convenience, security, and privacy reasons.
Because the compiled code is executed on the client computer system, the user has to first download the necessary code to their computer system before they are able to access and manipulate the controls. When the client-based code changes, the user downloads updated versions of the code in order to remain compatible with the server-based code. If the web-site is unfamiliar to the user, the user may have security and privacy concerns regarding downloading software from an unfamiliar source. Capturing users"" attention on the Web through interactive controls is a challenge to many types of Web-based businesses.
A portable thin-client solution is needed to provide interactive controls without necessitating downloading compiled code to the client computer system.
In one embodiment of the present invention, a client-server computer system allows the server computer system to store data corresponding to graphical controls, create pages of information to display to the user on the client computer system, and bind the data to the graphical controls so that the user may display the bound data and/or the user may manipulate the graphic control to effectuate a resultant change in the data bound to the graphical controls and stored on the server computer system and/or on the pages of information. The system allows controls to be interactively manipulated by the user and corresponding data on the server modified, without the user needing to install executable software other than standard Internet browser software (i.e., Microsoft Explorer, Netscape Navigator, etc.).
One embodiment of the present invention includes, a Gantt chart comprised of multiple interactive data-bound controls (i.e., task bars within the Gantt chart) that enable the user to manipulate the data corresponding to the various tasks stored on a server computer and/or in a Web page, such as start and finish dates, as well as update the appearance of the actual Gantt chart displayed to the user on the client computer system.
The foregoing is a summary and thus contains, by necessity, simplifications, generalizations and omissions of detail; consequently, those skilled in the art will appreciate that the summary is illustrative only and is not intended to be in any way limiting. Other aspects, inventive features, and advantages of the present invention, as defined solely by the claims, will become apparent in the non-limiting detailed description set forth below.